Successful software development is a long term activity. If you plan to be successful, you should therefore plan for your code base to be maintained by a succession of many different programmers over a period of many years. Not planning for that is planning to fail.

-- from Why Create Coding Standards and Perform Code Reviews?

Sounds like you might have benefited from code reviews and a company coding standard. BTW, I see that Perl monk JavaFan was very dubious of the benefit of a company coding standard in Why Create Coding Standards and Perform Code Reviews? Maybe he was the "Java fan boy" in your old company? :)

Though we've had a company Perl coding standard for many years, consistently enforcing it was problematic. It still exists but is advisory only, rarely enforced. Peer code reviews are still mandatory.

In reply to Re^6: Working with old code by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Working with old code by Anonymous Monk

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